I’ve seen and heard this scenario countless times. Two perfectly suited strategic partners determine they should start doing some things together in an effort to create referral opportunities for each other.

They shake hands and agree that it’s a fabulous idea, but then nothing happens. Mostly nothing happens because there’s no catalyst to get the ball rolling in a way that makes sense.

I mean, sure, they could both send out a mass mailing to their clients professing how great the other is, but would that really offer much value to the recipients?

One of the best ways to get a referral relationship moving is through content opportunities. It’s just such a logical way to extend what is already a proven marketing practice.

If you would like to build a killer local referral generator you should look no further than hosting a multi-author WordPress blog. (It doesn’t have to be WordPress, it’s just the best tool.)

Let’s say you’re an attorney that works with small business owners. In your work you’ve seen that small business owners need accounting advice, hiring advice, management advice, marketing advice, real estate advice, outsourcing advice, selling advice, leadership advice, and the list goes on and on.

Well, what if you built a team of best of class advice providers for many of the items listed above and you created and hosted a blog that featured contributions from each of these providers.

With any commitment at all your team could produce a local, keyword rich, content asset that would turn into a valuable resource for your clients and prospects and a logical referral generator for every member of the contributing team.

Of course, this could just be the start of your formal partnership team as you could easily turn this into group sponsored workshops and online seminars as well. Are you starting to see the power behind being the one that formalizes the network?

I hope it goes without saying that the content must be educational and valuable. This effort will offer little if it’s just an ad for all parties. Give great advice openly, use local keywords and phrases and create a consistent flow of new content and this tool will allow you to dominate local search results.

Creating a multi-author WordPress blog isn’t any more difficult that creating a single author blog, but there are a few considerations when it comes to promoting, managing and securing your platform that can be handled with the addition of the following plugins.

Promoting your contributors

WP Biographia – This is great plugin because it adds all kinds of extra fields like social links to the user profile screen and creates a bio for each author. This way when your authors post content their bio automatically shows at the end of each of their posts and features links to their social profiles making it easy for people to connect.

WordPress does not by default allow users to upload photos so add the User Photo plugin too and then Biographia will add your contributor’s photo.

Managing the content flow

User Role Editor – WordPress defines what set roles like subscribe or contributor can do (See a list) but sometimes you may want to edit these a bit. For example an author can’t by default upload images. If you have a trusted group of authors creating content and you want them to add images to their posts, which is usually a good thing, then use the editor to grant that permission.

Editorial Calendar – This tool simply creates a monthly calendar and allows you to drag drafts to dates for automatic publishing. This is a great way to take lots of content and spread it out for consistent publishing. For managing bigger groups and creating deadlines you might also look at DivvyHQ

Keeping things secure

Adminimize – This is a pretty cool tool as it lets you strip away everything you want from the admin dashboard. You might want to hide a bunch of stuff you as the admin don’t really use, but you certainly want to take away most of what your contributors see as well. Some things are naturally hidden based on WordPress default roles, but you can really make a clean posting screen for your contributors by taking away everything you know they don’t need access to.

Every business knows they need to produce great content. By facilitating the creation of this content in a way that can benefit your clients, prospects and referral partners, you can create a platform that will start to attract more of all of the above.

I believe the future of business and commitment building resides in the idea of viewing your business as a platform for your community.

The notion of a platform is one that receives a fair amount of play in various contexts.

An author is said to possess a platform when they have built a following. Consultants might work with a business owner to build a platform through speaking, writing, blogging and connecting in social media. And finally, many tech firms have built platforms by creating open source software, such as WordPress, that allows other 3rd party providers to build commerce and community on top of their framework.

Amazon sells lots of books, but in order to do that they needed to develop lots of file serving and storage capacity and get very, very good at delivering lightning quick web results in one of the highest traffic demand environments online.

Amazon took something that had little to do with their existing business, but which they had become incredibly proficient at, and created Amazon Web Services that allows thousands of business to build on the Amazon framework. I host and stream all of my product videos using Amazon S3 servers.

Airbnb is a community marketplace that allows property owners and travelers to connect with each other for the purpose of renting unique vacation spaces around the world. I use it frequently and love how simple the service is to use. Airbnb is built on Amazon Web Services and uses their database tools to build their community.

I would like to suggest that the notion of a platform is one that we can apply to almost any business.

What is a platform in this context?

A platform is a system that helps people create products, services, profits, businesses, communities, and networks of their own. The dynamics that must be present to create a platform environment are openness and collaboration.

So, the questions you need to ponder are:

• How could you or your business act as a platform?
• What could others build on top of your business or products?
• How could you add more value through your platform approach?
• How could you grow a network on your platform?
• Are there other businesses that your platform could launch?
• How could your community generate value for each other?
• How could your platform learn from community members?
• How could you create something open enough to attract your competitors?
• What platforms already exist that you could build on?
• Could you use your existing purpose, culture or community as a platform?
• What could you acquire as a way to build a platform?
• What could you extend as a way to build a platform?

When you start to think about your business in this manner you can move beyond the traditional applications of the term platform and blend platform type thinking into your business model, your culture and ultimately how you engage and communicate with your community.

Find your unique framework for openness

The key is to locate your unique framework as the foundation for the platform. Often times this requires thinking far outside of what your core business was designed to do and looking purely at things you can do, things you’ve gotten good at doing, even if they are simply things you do to support your core business.

AppleTree Answers is a call center business headquartered in Wilmington Delaware. The company has built a platform of sorts by figuring out how to change the paradigm of the call center culture. The company has received numerous awards for workplace excellence and is a frequent member of the Inc 500 and 5000.

AppleTree’s rapid growth then has come about by acquiring other small call centers and installing Appletree’s unique framework of openness. Appletree’s strong culture is the platform they’ve built all of their expansion on.

It’s all about building more value

A major dynamic of the platform component is value creation. No matter what your business does it will sink or swim based on the value (perceived or otherwise) it creates in someone’s life. This is extremely so when we talk about the community aspect of a platform.

Further, if you want to differentiate your business from others that are already providing value to a market, you’ve got to find a way to create more value as a competitive edge.

Many people default to adding features to products and services as a way to address value, but I think the real impact in value creation comes from strategically finding ways to add value in the way your business delivers a unique experience to its customer rather than through some sort of product enhancement.

The beauty of understanding value creation at the strategic level and then forcing that thinking into every tactical decision is that this is some of the most profitable work you can do. When a market comes to value what you have to offer as the “go to” choice you’re on your way to a premium pricing opportunity. People will pay dearly for an experience that helps them get more of what they want out of life.

Image:One-Fat-Man via Flickr CC

The poll question above is a bit loaded and, not that I want to skew the results, the answer for most lies in the fact that they don’t really know what results they expected or what result they are actually getting. Mostly they know the results aren’t what they had hoped for, but that’s another issue.

Setting expectations

One of the simplest, yet most effective, things you can do is set expectations or goals for your marketing. You can create overall revenue goals, campaign goals or more product or service specific goals, but either way, simply defining a target number will prove to be one of the best first steps.

Goals are like magnets in a way. If we define them and measure our results towards achieving them, they can produce some pretty dramatic pull.

I know this is an obvious bit of advice, but experience tells me that few businesses actually set real, tangible and meaningful targets. How many widgets do you need to sell this month? How many press mentions do you want to add this quarter? How many newsletter subscribers, webinar attendees or trial evaluations must you complete this week?

Measuring results

Once you define your marketing expectations you must define and track the most important indicators that will tell you if you are on track.

You can make this is a simple as a weekly sales total or as complex as the results of multivariate ad element testing, but the key is start measuring something and sharing the numbers.

If you’re not measuring anything, break a few key numbers down and figure out a way to produce a weekly spreadsheet that you use as a guide and also use to share with team members. Then start looking for ways to add key indicators to the list so in addition to simply measuring results you can start measuring individual effectiveness.

Add Google Analytics to your web site and pick up a copy of Web Analytics 2.0: The Art of Online Accountability and Science of Customer Centricity
by Avinash Kaushik.

If you’ve been measuring key indicators and you’re comfortable with a tool like Google Analytics, consider looking at a more advanced form of measurement from the use of a tool like KissMetrics. This tool can measure so many things that it can also overwhelm, so don’t start here unless you’ve mastered the basics.

I had a heart scan the other day – mainly because I’m old and my spouse is convincing in the most loving way.

a4gpa via Flickr CC

More often than not the heart is the subject of poems and songs about romance and love but in addition to being a physical masterpiece I believe it is a formidable business tool.

The idea of love as it relates to business is a tricky one. People talk about loving or not loving a business or the products and services of a particular business, but rarely is love looked at as a strategic way to run a business or lead a team.

The heart is seen as weak and squishy and emotions like love have no place in cold hard world of commerce.

But, here’s what I think. It takes incredible courage and strength to lead with your heart, but it’s actually the most natural and freeing way to do so. The heart isn’t all sappy and bending at all, it’s a ridiculously appropriate and intuitive decision-making tool.

May I suggest that you lead with your heart.

Heeding the mind body connection that comes with following your heart is how you fill your business with passion and purpose. It’s how you make the decisions in every instant that are right for you and most likely right for others involved.

Try this – get up and walk across the room and focus on leading with your heart – literally taking steps with the mind to push your heart out in front with every step. As physical as this action seems you’ll find that it also creates an immediate emotional sense of confidence and well-being.

Running coaches and yoga instructors alike frequently urge their students to lead with their heart as they perfect their form and move gracefully from pose to pose.

When it comes to building your business, tapping your passion, brining a sense of higher purpose to your work, making decisions that determine the outcome of a situation that impacts your life and the lives of others – lead with your heart.

Your heart – or at least that sensations that you receive as you ponder a decision – will instantly tell you the right choice to make, if you only pay attention.

But let me warn you, lest you think this is simple pop nonsense – making a decision out of love is much more difficult than making one out of fear.

Have you ever made a decision or taken an action in the heat of the moment, maybe in a moment of doubt or fear, only to regret it or overturn it when you regained some sense of calm and you thought more about it? That was your heart regaining the wheel.

Have you ever experienced that “something about this doesn’t feel right” kind of moment and then learned later that you’re instincts were dead on? That was you listening to your heart.

The heart is good for business because it cherishes

• Love over hate
• Faith over doubt
• Hope over despair
• Light over darkness
• Joy over sadness
• Passion over indifference

Leading with the heart is good for business because it prefers

• Giving over receiving
• Lifting up over tearing down
• Teaching over dictating
• Abundance over scarcity
• Understanding over telling

People frequently advise that you must find something you are passionate about in order to succeed and, while I believe there is merit in that advice, I further believe you can fall in love with whatever you do if you choose to lead with the heart.

The opportunity to lead with your heart is the absolute best part about doing what you love.

My weekend blog post routine includes posting links to a handful of tools or great content I ran across during the week.

I don’t go into depth about the finds, but encourage you check them out if they sound interesting. The photo in the post is a favorite for the week from Flickr or from my own travels.

First run of the day Telluride

Good stuff I found this week:

Quipol – Easily create and embed social polls that are very easy to use and very good looking

Transcribe – free online tool that makes it much easier to transcribe an audio – type and listen in the same place and keyboard shortcuts let you slow the audio down and skip around.

SocialBro – Great piece of software that allows you analyze and manage your Twitter following, including the best times to Tweet when your following are on Twitter.

read more

Marketing podcast with Laura Fitton (Click to play or right click and “Save As” to download – Subscribe now via iTunes or subscribe via other RSS device (Google Listen)

A number of years ago Hubspot created something called the Website Grader, a tool that graded a number of important aspects about a website and concocted a score or grade based on those factors.

Although no tool can really accurately measure the effectiveness of a website, the tool had a nice marketing bent to it and was a pretty simple way to help someone understand the most important elements of their site.

About a month ago Hubspot upped the game and came out with what they are calling Marketing Grader. The tool still focuses on your website, but it also considers a number of offsite considerations that have a great deal to do with success on the web these days.

Things like Facebook, Klout and Twitter use are considered and the overall integration of social in general. Again, no tool will ever be perfect, but I highly recommend running your site through this tool.

The report it produces breaks your grade into three topics – top of the funnel – what you’re to attract visitors, middle – what you’re doing to convert that traffic, and analytics – what you’re doing to measure the effectiveness of your marketing.

In addition to simply grading your site, you’ll be offered action items for things that need attention and every element measured comes with a handy tip that talks about best practices for the item. Simply going through and reading those tips would be beneficial for many people.

For this week’s episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast I visit with Hubspot’s Inbound Markeitng Evangelist Laura Fitton. Fitton, who some may know as @Pistachio, does a great job in this interview explaining the ins and out of the Marketing Grader.

Yesterday’s post about using a tool called Buffer to schedule Tweets throughout the day had some folks cheering and some folks suggesting that scheduled Tweets ruined the conversation on Twitter and were kind of bot like.

What’s your thinking on this. Take the quick poll and leave your two cents in the comments if you like.

Image: born1945 via FlickrCC

One of the services I believe marketers should provide their followers and community members these days is that of filtering and aggregating good, relevant content.

I subscribe to over 100 blogs and I hear over and over again how much some of the folks that choose to follow me on Twitter and Facebook appreciate that I share what I think some of the best reads from each day.

I share other things in those platforms as well, but I generally find 8-10 blog posts daily that I think people will appreciate.

The problem is that when I scan through my RSS Reader, something I do before most of my readers have had breakfast, I don’t want to Tweet all 8-10 at one time because it kind of overwhelms a handful of people and leaves little for those that get on social networks at other times of the day.

To solve this problem I started using a free app called Buffer and not only am I hooked, I’ve seen its use by many other publishers skyrocket of late as well. (The free version only allows you to have 10 updates in the buffer and is limited to one user.)

Why I use it

The Buffer app is a tool that allows me to easily bookmark and schedule Tweets or Facebook updates from any browser or mobile device. This way I can effectively spread my Tweets out over the course of a day, whether I find something in my morning reading or as I surf around throughout the day.

The times that Buffer posts the updates are preset by me so I simply fill up the Buffer and it does the rest. You can hit the post now option to immediately post and you have total control over when it posts. I have a pretty good feel for the best times to post for my readership but you might want to use a tool like SocialBro to gather some research into the best times for you.

Buffer also produces statistics so you can see how many people clicked on links you shared, the estimated reach and the number of Retweets.

There are some other tools that can accomplish much of what Buffer does, for example TweetDeck allows scheduled Tweets, but Buffer just works much better with the way I work and makes it much easier for me to be more active in sharing.

How I use it

While there is an iPhone app for Buffer the way I choose to use it is a little different than some I suspect.

I do most of my feed reading using the Reeder app on my iPhone. (Note this is different than Google Reader) The reason I love this app is that it allows me tap into my Google Reader account and have all my feeds that I organize there. (You can install Buffer as an option in Google Reader too)

The real feature I love though is that it gives me a handful of options for sharing and handling the posts right from the within the app. I can bookmark and tag it to Delicious or Pinboard, add to Facebook or Twitter, paste to Evernote, copy the link or email the title and link.

To use this app with Buffer I use the fact that Buffer gives every account holder a unique email address that will post items to the their Buffer account. So, as I read my posts I simply hit the “mail link” function in Reeder and it sends the title and link to Buffer. Anything that I put in the subject of the email will be posted as the body of the Tweet.

Buffer then puts all my emailed updates in the queue based on the times I’ve picked and viola – nice bit of posting scheduled throughout the day. Buffer also allows me to connect my branded linked shortener that set up with bit.ly so my Buffered links are shown as ducttape.me – a nice bonus in the scheme of things.

Look around and you’ll see a number of blogs adding the Buffer button to their posts to make it even easier for people who use this tool to share.

You should also grab the Buffer extension for your browser of choice or drag the Buffer bookmarket to your toolbar so that you can add items to Buffer as you surf throughout the day. I use the extension for Firefox and it puts a little Buffer icon at the bottom of the page and gives my one click posting to Buffer.

My weekend blog post routine includes posting links to a handful of tools or great content I ran across during the week.

I don’t go into depth about the finds, but encourage you check them out if they sound interesting. The photo in the post is a favorite for the week from Flickr.

Image igorschwarzmann via Flickr CC

Good stuff I found this week:
Agendize – Suite of online conversion tools that allows you to add click to call, chat, schedule appointment, live reviews and more.

Get Smart Content – application allows you to set rules such as – visited our website four times or from California and show different content based on visitors.

InboxQ – ask this service a question and it will quickly show you the best people on Twitter to answer it. You can also show off your knowledge by answering questions.